Walt Whitman Wrote A Letter
February 9, 1888
Have you ever kept rewriting a story or poem because you just weren't satisfied with it? Walt Whitman wrote his poem about President Lincoln, "O Captain! My Captain!" in 1865, but he revised it in 1866, and again in 1871.

After the wrong version of his poem was published in the Riverside Literature Series No. 32, Whitman wrote to the publishers on February 9, 1888. "Somehow you have got a couple of bad perversions in 'O Captain,'" he wrote, "I send you a corrected sheet."